Fan Theory: Jurassic Park Never had Real Dinosaurs

The big stars of Jurassic Park are, of course, the dinosaurs. However, according to an oddly convincing fan theory, there were never any real dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movies. According to this theory, the ‘dinosaurs’ that John Hammond created were not resurrected from ancient dinosaur DNA, they were, in fact, brand new creatures made by altering the DNA of contemporary animals. You see, the whole ‘dinosaurs back from extinction’ thing was just a ploy to attract and fool gullible visitors.

The theory goes like this: The premise of Jurassic Park revolves around the idea that geneticists extracted dinosaur DNA from prehistoric mosquitoes trapped in fossilised chunks of tree sap. But, this is impossible because DNA has a half-life and would, therefore, have decayed beyond use after 65 million years. Moreover, the odds would be astronomical for you to find a mosquito who limited its blood intake to just one particular species of dinosaur. Each mosquito would have hundreds of different DNA strands all mixed together.

Consequently, the only way Jurassic Park could obtain dinosaurs would be to build them from scratch. This would explain why all the dinosaurs in the movies look like how we, the ignorant public, imagine dinosaurs looked like as opposed to how palaeontologists argue they actually appeared in nature. For instance, in real life, a Velociraptor was the size of a chicken, whereas in Jurassic Park, Velociraptors are near 6 foot tall monsters. Also, most dinosaurs probably had feathers. Additionally, the Dilophosaurus, the tiny, spitting beast with a multicolour neck frill, was 10 feet tall and did not spit poison.

We also know that the park’s founder, John Hammond, built his fortune by selling people false realities. In the first movie he even gives an entire speech about how he began his career with a motorised flea circus designed to trick small children. Also, in The Lost World, we discover that the laboratory where the baby raptor hatched in the first film was just a show for the tourists, the majority of dinosaur hatching was undertaken on a completely different island, despite Hammond insisting to his guests that he had been present for every single birth. Furthermore, at one point Dr. Sattler notices that Jurassic Park is covered in extinct species of plants. The problem is, you can’t clone a plant from mosquitoes encased in amber, so how did they get there? The only explanation we can conjure up is that the plants are a genetic replica.

Resultantly, Dr. Grant, Dr. Sattler and Dr. Malcolm weren’t brought to the park to determine whether it was safe for visitors, they were brought to the park to determine whether it would be believable to visitors. Hammond must have thought that if he could fool a palaeontologist into thinking he was seeing dinosaurs, a paleobotanist into thinking she was seeing extinct plants and a mathematician into believing that the science was accurate, then he could fool the general public.